memex/areas/books/You Are Not a Gadget - Jaron Lanier.org

* You Are Not a Gadget - Jaron Lanier
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** The tyrrany of Microsoft and Apple can now be dismanteled because AI promises a possible end to the knowledge worker, either in bureacracies or in the creative domain
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Standards and their inevitable lack of prescience posed a nuisance before computers, of course. Railroad gauges—the dimensions of the tracks—are one example. The London Tube was designed with narrow tracks and matching tunnels that, on several of the lines, cannot accommodate air-conditioning, because there is no room to ventilate the hot air from the trains. Thus, tens of thousands of modern-day residents in one of the world’s richest cities must suffer a stifling commute because of an inflexible design decision made more than one hundred years ago.

But software is worse than railroads, because it must always adhere with absolute perfection to a boundlessly particular, arbitrary, tangled, intractable messiness. The engineering requirements are so stringent and perverse that adapting to shifting standards can be an endless struggle. So while lock-in may be a gangster in the world of railroads, it is an absolute tyrant in the digital world.
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** Notes for page (7 . 21020)
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UNIX had files; the Mac as it shipped had files; Windows had files. Files are now part of life; we teach the idea
of a file to computer science students as if it were part of nature. In fact, our conception of files may be more
persistent than our ideas about nature. I can imagine that someday physicists might tell us that it is time to
stop believing in photons, because they have discovered a better way to think about light—but the file will
likely live on.

The file is a set of philosophical ideas made into eternal flesh. The ideas expressed by the file include the
notion that human expression comes in severable chunks that can be organized as leaves on an abstract
tree—and that the chunks have versions and need to be matched to compatible applications.
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** This is mental masturbation. Information wants to be free because we want to be free
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You can think of culturally decodable information as a potential form of experience,
very much as you can think of a brick resting on a ledge as storing potential energy.
When the brick is prodded to fall, the energy is revealed. That is only possible
because it was lifted into place at some point in the past.

In the same way, stored information might cause experience to be revealed if it is
prodded in the right way. A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the
kind that objectively exists. The fact that the  bits are discernible instead of being
scrambled into mush—the way heat scrambles things—is what makes them bits.

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** Notes for page (8 . 34493)
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The new twist in Silicon Valley is that some people—very influential people—believe
they are hearing algorithms and crowds and other internet-supported nonhuman
entities speak for themselves. I don’t hear those voices, though—and I believe those
who do are fooling themselves.
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** Democracy shouldn't be too fast. The recent change of heart France has during the general elections is but one example.
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For instance, stock markets might adopt automatic trading shutoffs, which are
triggered by overly abrupt shifts in price or trading volume. (In Chapter 6 I will tell how
Silicon Valley ideologues recently played a role in convincing Wall Street that it could
do without some of these checks on the crowd, with disastrous consequences.)

Wikipedia had to slap a crude low-pass filter on the jitteriest entries, such as
“President George W. Bush.” There’s now a limit to how often a particular person can
remove someone else’s text fragments. I suspect that these kinds of adjustments will
eventually evolve into an approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the
internet arrived.
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** Marxism was only held back by technology creating better jobs
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Marx was all about technological change. Unfortunately, his approach to correcting
inequities spawned an awful series of violent revolutions. He argued that the playing
field should be leveled before the technologies of abundance mature. It has been
repeatedly confirmed, however, that leveling a playing field with a Marxist revolution
kills, dulls, or corrupts most of the people on the field. Even so, versions of his ideas
continue to have enormous appeal for many, especially young people. Marx’s ideas
still color utopian technological thinking, including many of the thoughts that appear
to be libertarian on the surface. (I will examine stealth technomarxism later on.)

What has saved us from Marxism is simply that new technologies have in general
created new jobs—and those jobs have generally been better than the old ones. They
have been ever more elevated—more cerebral, creative, cultural, or strategic—than
the jobs they replaced. A descendant of a Luddite who smashed looms might be
programming robotic looms today.
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** Here, Lanier, like many, missed seeing the rise of AI before automation
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China’s precipitous climb into wealth has been largely based on cheap, high-quality
labor. But the real possibility exists that sometime in the next two decades a vast
number of jobs in China and elsewhere will be made obsolete by advances in cheap
robotics so quickly that it will be a cruel shock to hundreds of millions of people.

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** This is a good critique of the open culture movement and the sitation with streaming services
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What Makes Liberty Different from Anarchy Is Biological Realism

The open culture crowd believes that human behavior can only be modified through
involuntary means. This makes sense for them, because they aren’t great believers in
free will or personhood.

For instance, it is often claimed by open culture types that if you can’t make a perfect
copy-protection technology, then copy prohibitions are pointless. And from a
technological point of view, it is true that you can’t make a perfect copy-protection
scheme. If flawless behavior restraints are the only potential influences on behavior in
a case such as this, we might as well not ask anyone to ever pay for music or
journalism again. According to this logic, the very idea is a lost cause.

But that’s an unrealistically pessimistic way of thinking about people. We have
already demonstrated that we’re better than that. It’s easy to break into physical cars
and houses, for instance, and yet few people do so. Locks are only amulets of
inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from. It is only
human choice that makes the human world function. Technology can motivate human
choice, but not replace it.

I had an epiphany once that I wish I could stimulate in everyone else. The plausibility
of our human world, the fact that the buildings don’t all fall down and you can eat
unpoisoned food that someone grew, is immediate palpable evidence of an ocean of
goodwill and good behavior from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in
what can be called love.

And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization, because
those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature. We must see ourselves
honestly, and engage ourselves realistically, in order to become better.
** Notes for page (17 . 10811)
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I well recall the birth of the free software movement, which preceded and inspired the
open culture variant. It started out as an act of rage more than a quarter of a century
ago.

Visualize, if you will, the most transcendently messy, hirsute, and otherwise eccentric
pair of young nerds on the planet. They were in their early twenties. The scene was an
uproariously messy hippie apartment  in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the vicinity of
MIT. I was one of these men; the other was Richard Stallman.

Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like
the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results
of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many
regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on
Earth? An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been
able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable
originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural
rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.

Stallman was distraught to the point of tears. He had poured his energies into a
celebrated project to build a radically new kind of computer called the LISP machine.
But it wasn’t just a regular computer running LISP, a programming language beloved
by artificial intelligence researchers. * Instead, it was a machine patterned on LISP from
the bottom up, making a radical statement about what computing could be like at
every level, from the underlying architecture to the user interface. For a brief period,
every hot computer science department had to own some of these refrigerator-size
gadgets.

Eventually a company called Symbolics became the primary seller of LISP machines.
Stallman realized that a whole experimental subculture of computer science risked
being dragged into the toilet if anything bad happened to a little company like
Symbolics—and of course everything bad happened to it in short order.

So Stallman hatched a plan. Never again would computer code, and the culture that
grew up with it, be trapped inside a wall of commerce and legality. He would develop
a free version of an ascendant, if rather dull, software tool: the UNIX operating
system. That simple act would blast apart the idea that lawyers and companies could
control software culture.

Eventually a young programmer of the next generation named Linus Torvalds followed
in Stallman’s footsteps and did something similar, but  using the popular Intel chips. In
1991 that effort yielded Linux, the basis for a vastly expanded free software
movement.

But back to that dingy bachelor pad near MIT. When Stallman told me his plan, I was
intrigued but sad. I thought that code was important in more ways than politics can
ever be. If politically motivated code was going to amount to endless replays of
relatively dull stuff like UNIX instead of bold projects like the LISP machine, what was
the point? Would mere humans have enough energy to sustain both kinds of
idealism?

Twenty-five years later, it seems clear that my concerns were justified. Open
wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t
promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything,
they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped
in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old
software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of
an antique—shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

I’m not anti-open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But the
politically correct dogma that holds that open source is automatically the best path to
creativity and innovation is not borne out by the facts.

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** No new music since the late 1990s
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Where is the new music? Everything is retro, retro, retro.

Music is everywhere, but hidden, as indicated by tiny white prairie dog-like
protuberances popping out of everyone’s ears. I am used to seeing people making
embarrassingly sexual faces and moaning noises when listening to music on
headphones, so it’s taken me a while to get used to the stone faces of the earbud
listeners in the coffeehouse.

Beating within the retro indie band that wouldn’t have sounded out of place even
when I was a teenager there might be some exotic heart, some layer of energy I’m
not hearing. Of course, I can’t know my own limits. I can’t know what I am not able to
hear.

But I have been trying an experiment. Whenever I’m around “Face-book generation”
people and there’s music playing—probably selected by an artificial intelligence or
crowd-based algorithm, as per the current fashion—I ask them a simple question: Can
you tell in what decade the music that is playing right now was made? Even listeners
who are not particularly music oriented can do pretty well with this question—but only
for certain decades.

Everyone knows that gangster rap didn’t exist yet in the 1960s, for instance. And
that heavy metal didn’t exist in the 1940s. Sure, there’s an occasional track that
sounds as if it’s from an earlier era. Maybe a big-band track recorded in the 1990s
might be mistaken for an older recording, for instance.

But a decade was always a long time in the development of musical style during the
first century of audio recording. A decade gets you from Robert Johnson’s primordial
blues recordings to Charlie Parker’s intensely modernist jazz recordings. A decade
gets you from the reign of big bands to the reign of rock and roll. Approximately a
decade separated the last Beatles record from the first big-time hip-hop records. In all
these examples, it is inconceivable that the later offering could have  appeared at the
time of the earlier one. I can’t find a decade span in the first century of recorded
music that didn’t involve extreme stylistic evolution, obvious to listeners of all kinds.

We’re not just talking about surface features of the music, but the very idea of what
music was all about, how it fit into life. Does it convey classiness and confidence, like
Frank Sinatra, or help you drop out, like stoner rock? Is it for a dance floor or a dorm
room?

There are new styles of music, of course, but they are new only on the basis of
technicalities. For instance, there’s an elaborate nomenclature for species of similar
electronic beat styles (involving all the possible concatenations of terms like dub,
house, trance, and so on), and if you learn the details of the nomenclature, you can
more or less date and place a track. This is more of a nerd exercise than a musical
one—and I realize that in saying that I’m making a judgment that perhaps I don’t
have a right to make. But does anyone really disagree?

I have frequently gone through a conversational sequence along the following lines:
Someone in his early twenties will tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, and
then I’ll challenge that person to play me some music that is characteristic of the late
2000s as opposed to the late 1990s. I’ll ask him to play the tracks for his friends. So
far, my theory has held: even true fans don’t seem to be able to tell if an indie rock
track or a dance mix is from 1998 or 2008, for instance.

I’m obviously not claiming that there has been no new music in the world. And I’m
not claiming that all the retro music is disappointing. There are some wonderful
musicians in the retro mold, treating old pop music styles as a new kind of classical
music and doing so marvelously well.

But I am saying that this kind of work is more nostalgic than reaching. Since genuine
human experiences are forever unique, pop music of a new era that lacks novelty
raises my suspicions that it also lacks authenticity.

There are creative, original musicians at work today, of course. (I hope that on my
best days I am one of them.) There are undoubtedly musical marvels hidden around
the world. But this is the first time since electrification that mainstream youth culture
in the industrialized world has cloaked itself primarily in nostalgic styles.

 I am hesitant to share my observations for fear of hexing someone’s potentially good
online experience. If you are having a great time with music in the online world as it
is, don’t listen to me. But in terms of the big picture, I fear I am onto something.
What of it? Some of my colleagues in the digital revolution argue that we should be
more patient; certainly with enough time, culture will reinvent itself. But how patient
should we be? I find that I am not willing to ignore a dark age.

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** Ouch. This must have hurt them.
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Digital Culture That Isn’t Retro Is Still Based in a Retro Economy

Even the most seemingly radical online enthusiasts seem to always flock to retro
references. The sort of “fresh, radical culture” you expect to see celebrated in the
online world these days is a petty mashup of preweb culture.

Take a look at one of the big cultural blogs like Boing Boing, or the endless stream of
mashups that appear on YouTube. It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally
open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage
dump.

This is embarrassing. The whole point of connected media technologies was that we
were supposed to come up with new, amazing cultural expression. No, more than
that—we were supposed to invent better fundamental types of expression: not just
movies, but interactive virtual worlds; not just games, but simulations with moral and
aesthetic profundity. That’s why I was criticizing the old way of doing things.
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** This section on the evolution of smell and the cerebral cortex is fascinating
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So now we are starting to have theories—or at least are able to tell detailed
stories—about how a brain might be able to recognize features  of its world, such as a
smile. But mouths do more than smile. Is there a way to extend our story to explain
what a word is, and how a brain can know a word?

It turns out that the best way to consider that question might be to consider a
completely different sensory domain. Instead of sights or sounds, we might best start
by considering the odors detected by a human nose.

For twenty years or so I gave a lecture introducing the fundamentals of virtual reality.
I’d review the basics of vision and hearing as well as of touch and taste. At the end,
the questions would begin, and one of the first ones was usually about smell: Will we
have smells in virtual reality machines anytime soon?

Maybe, but probably just a few. Odors are fundamentally different from images or
sounds. The latter can be broken down into primary components that are relatively
straightforward for computers—and the brain—to process. The visible colors are
merely words for different wavelengths of light. Every sound wave is actually
composed of numerous sine waves, each of which can be easily described
mathematically. Each one is like a particular size of bump in the corduroy roads of my
childhood.

In other words, both colors and sounds can be described with just a few numbers; a
wide spectrum of colors and tones is described by the interpolations between those
numbers. The human retina need be sensitive to only a few wavelengths, or colors, in
order for our brains to process all the intermediate ones. Computer graphics work
similarly: a screen of pixels, each capable of reproducing red, green, or blue, can
produce approximately all the colors that the human eye can see. * A music
synthesizer can be thought of as generating a lot of sine waves, then layering them to
create an array of sounds.

Odors are completely different, as is the brain’s method of sensing them. Deep in the
nasal passage, shrouded by a mucous membrane, sits a patch of tissue—the olfactory
epithelium—studded with neurons that detect chemicals. Each of these neurons has
cup-shaped proteins called olfactory receptors. When a particular molecule happens to
fall into a  matching receptor, a neural signal is triggered that is transmitted to the
brain as an odor. A molecule too large to fit into one of the receptors has no odor. The
number of distinct odors is limited only by the number of olfactory receptors capable
of interacting with them. Linda Buck of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
and Richard Axel of Columbia University, winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine, have found that the human nose contains about one
thousand different types of olfactory neurons, each type able to detect a particular
set of chemicals.

This adds up to a profound difference in the underlying structure of the senses—a
difference that gives rise to compelling questions about the way we think, and
perhaps even about the origins of language. There is no way to interpolate between
two smell molecules. True, odors can be mixed together to form millions of scents.
But the world’s smells can’t be broken down into just a few numbers on a gradient;
there is no “smell pixel.” Think of it this way: colors and sounds can be measured with
rulers, but odors must be looked up in a dictionary.

That’s a shame, from the point of view of a virtual reality technologist. There are
thousands of fundamental odors, far more than the handful of primary colors. Perhaps
someday we will be able to wire up a person’s brain in order to create the illusion of
smell. But it would take a lot of wires to address all those entries in the mental smell
dictionary. Then again, the brain must have some way of organizing all those odors.
Maybe at some level smells do fit into a pattern. Maybe there’s a smell pixel after all.

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** On the connection between swearing and smell
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Lngwidge iz a straynge thingee. You can probably read that sentence without much
trouble. Sentence also not this time hard.

 You can screw around quite a bit with both spelling and word order and still be
understood. This shouldn’t be surprising: language is flexible enough to evolve into
new slang, dialects, and entirely new tongues.

In the 1960s, many early computer scientists postulated that human language was a
type of code that could be written down in a neat, compact way, so there was a race
to crack that code. If it could be deciphered, then a computer ought to be able to
speak with people! That end result turned out to be extremely difficult to achieve.
Automatic language translation, for instance, never really took off.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, computers have gotten so powerful that
it has become possible to shift methods. A program can look for correlations in large
amounts of text. Even if it isn’t possible to capture all the language variations that
might appear in the real world (such as the above oddities I used as examples), a
sufficiently huge number of correlations eventually yields results.

For instance, suppose you have a lot of text in two languages, such as Chinese and
English. If you start searching for sequences of letters or characters that appear in
each text under similar circumstances, you can start to build a dictionary of
correlations. That can produce significant results, even if the correlations don’t always
fit perfectly into a rigid organizing principle, such as a grammar.

Such brute-force approaches to language translation have been demonstrated by
companies like Meaningful Machines, where I was an adviser for a while, and more
recently by Google and others. They can be incredibly inefficient, often involving ten
thousand times as much computation as older methods—but we have big enough
computers in the clouds these days, so why not put them to work?

Set loose on the internet, such a project could begin to erase language barriers. Even
though automatic language translation is unlikely to become as good as what a
human translator can do anytime soon, it might get good enough—perhaps not too
far in the future—to make countries and cultures more transparent to one another.
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** and in humans too, perhaps
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These experiments in linguistic variety could also inspire a better understanding of
how language came about in the first place. One of Charles  Darwin’s most compelling
evolutionary speculations was that music might have preceded language. He was
intrigued by the fact that many species use song for sexual display and wondered if
human vocalizations might have started out that way too. It might follow, then, that
vocalizations could have become varied and complex only later, perhaps when song
came to represent actions beyond mating and such basics of survival.
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** It has recently taken Apple and entire software development cycle to produce a new set of icons.
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For instance, the user interface to search engines is still based on the command line
interface, with which the user must construct logical phrases using symbols such as
dashes and quotes. That’s how personal computers used to be, but it took less than a
decade to get from the Apple II to the Macintosh. By contrast, it’s been well over a
decade since network-based search services appeared, and they are still trapped in
the command line era. At this rate, by 2020, we can expect software development to
have slowed to a near stasis, like a clock approaching a black hole.
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** Cefelopods should rule the world, except they are born alone and live alone. They don't have transmitted culture
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Remember the computer graphics in the movie Terminator 2 that made it possible for
the evil terminator to assume the form and visage of any person it encountered?
Morphing—the on-screen transformation—violated the unwritten rules of what was
allegedly possible to be seen, and in doing so provided a deep, wrenching pleasure
somewhere in the back of the viewer’s brain. You could almost feel your neural
machinery breaking apart and being glued back together.

Unfortunately, the effect has become a cliché. Nowadays, when you watch a television
ad or a science fiction movie, an inner voice says, “Ho hum, just another morph.”
However, there’s a video clip that I often show students and friends to remind them,
and myself, of the transportive effects of anatomical transformation. This video is so
shocking that most  viewers can’t process it the first time they see it—so they ask to
see it again and again and again, until their mind has expanded enough to take it in.

The video was shot in 1997 by Roger Hanlon while he was scuba diving off Grand
Cayman Island. Roger is a researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods
Hole; his specialty is the study of cephalopods, a family of sea creatures that include
octopuses, squids, and cuttlefishes. The video is shot from Roger’s point of view as he
swims up to examine an unremarkable rock covered in swaying algae.

Suddenly, astonishingly, one-third of the rock and a tangled mass of algae morphs
and reveals itself for what it really is: the waving arms of a bright white octopus. Its
cover blown, the creature squirts ink at Roger and shoots off into the
distance—leaving Roger, and the video viewer, slack-jawed.

The star of this video, Octopus vulgaris, is one of a number of cephalopod species
capable of morphing, including the mimic octopus and the giant Australian cuttlefish.
The trick is so weird that one day I tagged along with Roger on one of his research
voyages, just to make sure he wasn’t faking it with fancy computer graphics tricks. By
then, I was hooked on cephalopods. My friends have had to adjust to my obsession;
they’ve grown accustomed to my effusive rants about these creatures. As far as I’m
concerned, cephalopods are the strangest smart creatures on Earth. They offer the
best standing example of how truly different intelligent extraterrestrials (if they exist)
might be from us, and they taunt us with clues about potential futures for our own
species.

The raw brainpower of cephalopods seems to have more potential than the
mammalian brain. Cephalopods can do all sorts of things, like think in 3-D and
morph, which would be fabulous innate skills in a high-tech future. Tentacle-eye
coordination ought to easily be a match for hand-eye coordination. From the point of
view of body and brain, cephalopods are primed to evolve into the
high-tech-tool-building overlords. By all rights, cephalopods should be running the
show and we should be their pets.

What we have that they don’t have is neoteny. Our secret weapon is childhood.

Baby cephalopods must make their way on their own from the moment of birth. In
fact, some of them have been observed reacting to  the world seen through their
transparent eggs before they are born, based only on instinct. If people are at one
extreme in a spectrum of neoteny, cephalopods are at the other.

Cephalopod males often do not live long after mating. There is no concept of
parenting. While individual cephalopods can learn a great deal within a lifetime, they
pass on nothing to future generations. Each generation begins afresh, a blank slate,
taking in the strange world without guidance other than instincts bred into their
genes.

If cephalopods had childhood, surely they would be running the Earth. This can be
expressed in an equation, the only one I’ll present in this book:

Cephalopods + Childhood = Humans + Virtual Reality

Morphing in cephalopods works somewhat similarly to how it does in computer
graphics. Two components are involved: a change in the image or texture visible on a
shape’s surface, and a change in the underlying shape itself. The “pixels” in the skin
of a cephalopod are organs called chromatophores. These can expand and contract
quickly, and each is filled with a pigment of a particular color. When a nerve signal
causes a red chromatophore to expand, the “pixel” turns red. A pattern of nerve
firings causes a shifting image—an animation—to appear on the cephalopod’s skin. As
for shapes, an octopus can quickly arrange its arms to form a wide variety of forms,
such as a fish or a piece of coral, and can even raise welts on its skin to add texture.

Why morph? One reason is camouflage. (The octopus in the video is presumably
trying to hide from Roger.) Another is dinner. One of Roger’s video clips shows a giant
cuttlefish pursuing a crab. The cuttlefish is mostly soft-bodied; the crab is all armor.
As the cuttlefish approaches, the medieval-looking crab snaps into a macho posture,
waving its sharp claws at its foe’s vulnerable body.

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* This principle has even been demonstrated in dogs and monkeys. When Dr.
Friederike Range of the University of Vienna allowed dogs in a test to see other dogs
receive better rewards, jealousy ensued. Dogs demand equal treatment in order to be
trained well. Frans de Waal at Emory University found similar results in experiments
with capuchin monkeys.
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